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The Syrian government says the rebel armed groups backed and funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are committing “horrific crimes” against civilians in the capital, Damascus, and the city of Aleppo.

In two letters addressed to the head of the UN Security Council and the UN secretary general, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the rebels backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are using civilians in Aleppo as human shields, and killing anyone who does not support their crimes.

A large number of mercenaries are gathered in Aleppo, whose entry to the city has been facilitated by Turkey, the letters pointed out.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry further denounced the Western states’ reluctance to urge armed opposition groups to end their attacks in the country.

The Syrian government has regained control over all parts of the capital, and is now trying to clear the country's largest city, Aleppo, of the rebels.

The syrian military forces have cleared more areas in the city of Aleppo with reports of renewed heavy fighting between Syrian security forces and the armed rebel groups in the city.

According to an editorial in the pan-Arab newspaper, al-Quds al-Arab, Riyadh has been exerting pressure on Amman to join the anti-Syria war by cutting off its financial aid to the country since March 2011. The pressure came after Jordan’s refusal to support the armed opposition groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are not just tied to al-Qaeda, the CIA-funded fake Islamic terrorist group, they ARE al-Qaeda. In a video of members of the FSA, these men are brandishing AK-47s provided to them by the CIA and have al-Qaeda flags flying in the background.

Al-Qaeda has been used by the US government in insurgent recruitment and in destabilizing Middle Eastern governments. The new recruits, being trained by the CIA in Turkey, then being allocated to the FSA and being used to destroy the Syrian government are directly tied to al-Qaeda. In the mainstream media, al-Qaeda is still touted as a separate terrorist organization with no ties to the US government.

Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, is now decrying that his involvement in assisting the CIA has created a backlash of violence in his own country and compromised their national security.

Erdogan is reluctant to continue to cooperate with CIA training facilities that create more “troops” for the FSA who are released into Syria through the Turkish border. The further involvement of Turkey in attempting to “handover Assad” to the US government through the use of fake terrorist organizations is causing a Kurdish outcry while military training camps are turning out “a good number of Kurds” who have been taught how to covertly support the US and Israel movement toward forced regime change in Syria.

Abu Thuha (a pseudonym) is an al-Qaeda operative who claims that “we have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution. Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”

The terrorist activity in Syria has been directly committed by oppositional groups that are being controlled and directed by the US government in order to facilitate internal conflict, says a study by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Joseph Holiday, analyst for the ISW, who studies the influence al-Qaeda has had on the Arab Spring, asserts: “The emergence of Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells working against the regime poses risks to the United States and a challenge to those calling for material support of the armed opposition. It’s something to keep an eye out for, the convergence of Iraq and Syria. As the Syrian government loses the ability to project force on the periphery of its territory, what you’re going to see is an emboldened Sunni opposition emerging in Nineveh and Iraq.”

Daniel Byman, a professor and counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University as well as a fellow of the Brookings Institute, says that it is obvious that al-Qaeda is becoming more active in Syria. This terrorist organization was used by the US government in Somalia and Mali, and before that in Chechnya and Yemen, and the group is currently trying to turn a local conflict to its advantage. “There’s no question Al Qaeda wants to do that, and they are actually pretty good at this sort of thing,” said Byman. “They’ve done well at taking a local conflict” and taking it global. “They learned a lot from Iraq,” he remarks. “They even write about this — they say, ‘We got on the wrong side of the locals.’ ”

Along with use of fake terrorist groups, Syria is being accosted with false claims of chemical weapons which are being tied to Iran by the US government and Israel. Documents provided by the European Union are being used to support the WMDs false flag. The EU says they provided the technical assistance and equipment as well as $14.2 million to the Syrian Ministry of Industry in 2010. The EU says that now these procurements are being used to create a chemical weapon’s program.

An EU spokesperson says that the money they gave Syria was supposed to be allocated to safety standards for products and laboratories, but now they believe it has been used to create chemical weapons.

James Quinlivan, senior operations research analyst at the RAND Corporation, a globalist front for Elite agendas, claims that “calibration is a big deal for these things. While mustard [gas] lasts amazingly well, nerve agents do not. For nerve gases, particularly sarin, retention relies on purity, and this must be tested.”

WikiLeaks have been working with the US State Department in framing Iran and Syria, as the website has built a following and reputation as being an exposer of wrong-doings by governments. Yet, the WikiLeaks phenomena is also created and controlled by the US government and only “leaks” information that is useful to the US government’s agendas and strategies overseas.

T

The so-called “Syrian Files” were nothing more than propaganda planted by the US government in conjunction with Julian Assange to divert attention, create false claims against Syria and promote the coming military strike against Syria.

Surfacing just in time to prove that Syria has WMDs is a 2006 communication that was supposedly confidential which claims Syria and Iran are working together to develop 5 new chemical weapons plants; in particular that Syria has new sites that are fronts for manufacturing facilities.

This time the global Elite are not just claiming that the “enemy” has WMDs, they are planting the evidence so that the debacle that faced former President George W Bush with Iraq’s non-existent WMDs will not be an issue.

According to the falsified documents provided by WikiLeaks, a US diplomat states: “Iran would provide the construction design and equipment to annually produce tens to hundreds of tons of precursors for VX, sarin, and mustard [gas]. Engineers from Iran’s DIO [Defense Industries Organization] were to visit Syria and survey locations for the plants, and construction was scheduled from the end of 2005-2006.”

A 2008 correspondence by the US State Department says that Syria has become “sophisticated in its efforts to move equipment and resources from civilian programs to weapons development.”

According to the document “the Australians believe Syria is committed to improving and expanding its program, including through testing. Syria maintains a basic indigenous capability, in contrast to other countries of concern, but maintains some dependence on precursor imports. . . . Syria appears focused on importing precursors and precursors of precursors.”

The false flag assertion of Syrian chemical weapons is giving the international community the necessary fuel to support the US/Israeli military attack of Syria. It is being kept secret from the general public with the assistance of the MSM that the murder of Syrian civilians is being committed by the FSA under the direction of the CIA, the script being played out to keep Assad’s armies under foot with “little chance of turning defeat into victory.”

(Reuters) - Turkey has set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria's rebels from a city near the border, Gulf sources have told Reuters.

News of the clandestine Middle East-run "nerve centre" working to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad underlines the extent to which Western powers - who played a key role in unseating Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - have avoided military involvement so far in Syria.

"It's the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main co-ordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom," said a Doha-based source.

"The Americans are very hands-off on this. U.S. intel(ligence) are working through middlemen. Middlemen are controlling access to weapons and routes."

The centre in Adana, a city in southern Turkey about 100 km (60 miles) from the Syrian border, was set up after Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Saud visited Turkey and requested it, a source in the Gulf said. The Turks liked the idea of having the base in Adana so that they could supervise its operations, he added.

A Saudi foreign ministry official was not immediately available to comment on the operation.

Adana is home to Incirlik, a large Turkish/U.S. air force base which Washington has used in the past for reconnaissance and military logistics operations. It was not clear from the sources whether the anti-Syrian "nerve centre" was located inside Incirlik base or in the city of Adana.

Qatar, the tiny gas-rich Gulf state which played a leading part in supplying weapons to Libyan rebels, has a key role in directing operations at the Adana base, the sources said. Qatari military intelligence and state security officials are involved.

"All weaponry is Russian. The obvious reason is that these guys (the Syrian rebels) are trained to use Russian weapons, also because the Americans don't want their hands on it. All weapons are from the black market. The other way they get weapons is to steal them from the Syrian army. They raid weapons stores."

The source added: "The Turks have been desperate to improve their weak surveillance, and have been begging Washington for drones and surveillance." The pleas appear to have failed. "So they have hired some private guys come do the job."

President Barack Obama has so far preferred to use diplomatic means to try to oust Assad, although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled this week that Washington plans to step up help to the rebels.

Reuters has established that Obama's aides have drafted a resolution which would authorize greater covert assistance to the rebels but still stop short of arming them.

The White House's wariness is shared by other Western powers. It reflects concerns about what might follow Assad in Syria and about the substantial presence of anti-Western Islamists and jihadi fighters among the rebels.

The presence of the secret Middle East-run "nerve centre" may explain how the Syrian rebels, a rag-tag assortment of ill-armed and poorly organized groups, have pulled off major strikes such as the devastating bomb attack on July 18 which killed at least four key Assad aides including the defense minister.

A Turkish diplomat in the region insisted however that his country played no part in the Damascus bombing.

"That's out of the question," he said. "The Syrian minister of information blamed Turkey and other countries for the killing. Turkey doesn't do such things. We are not a terrorist country. Turkey condemns such attacks."

However, two former senior U.S. security officials said that Turkey has been playing an increasing role in sheltering and training Syrian rebels who have crossed into its territory.

One of the former officials, who is also an adviser to a government in the region, told Reuters that 20 former Syrian generals are now based in Turkey, from where they are helping shape the rebel forces. Israel believes up to 20,000 Syrian troops may now have defected to the opposition.

Former officials said there is reason to believe the Turks stepped up their support for anti-Assad forces after Syria shot down a Turkish plane which had made several passes over border areas.

Sources in Qatar said the Gulf state is providing training and supplies to the Syrian rebels.

"The Qataris mobilized their special forces team two weeks ago. Their remit is to train and help logistically, not to fight," said a Doha-based source with ties to the FSA.

Qatar's military intelligence directorate, Foreign Ministry and State Security Bureau are involved, said the source.

WESTERN CAUTION

The United States, Israel, France and Britain - traditionally key players in the Middle East - have avoided getting involved so far, largely because they see little chance of a "good outcome" in Syria.

"Israel is not really in the business of trying to 'shape' the outcome of the revolt,", a diplomat in the region said. "The consensus is that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. The risk of identifying with any side is too great".

A former U.S. official who advises a government in the region and other current and former U.S. and European security officials say that there has been little to zero direct assistance or training from the U.S. or its European allies.

The former official also said that few sophisticated weapons such as shoulder-fired bazookas for destroying tanks or surface-to-air missiles have reached the anti-Assad forces.

While some Gulf officials and conservative American politicians have privately suggested that a supply of surface-to-air missiles would help anti-Assad forces bring the conflict to a close, officials familiar with U.S. policy say they are anxious to keep such weapons out of the hands of Syrian rebels. They fear such weapons could make their way to pro-jihad militants who could use them against Western aircraft.

AFTER ASSAD

The CIA and the Israelis' main concern so far has been that elements of al-Qaeda may attempt to infiltrate the rebels and acquire some of Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons.

Sima Shine, a former chief Mossad analyst who now serves as an adviser to the Israeli government, told Reuters: "It's a nightmare for the international community, and chiefly the Americans - weapons of mass-destruction falling into the hands of terrorists. In parallel to its foreign contacts, Israel is taking this especially seriously. After all, we are here, and the Americans are over there."

She envisaged two circumstances under which Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist group, could obtain some of the chemical weapons stockpile.

"Assad goes and anarchy ensues, during which Hezbollah gets its hands on the weapons. There is a significant Hezbollah presence in Syria and they are well-ensconced in the military and other national agencies. So they are close enough to make a grab for it.

"Another possibility is that Assad, knowing that he is on his way out, will authorized a handover to Hezbollah, as a message to the world about the price of encouraging his ouster."

However, British and U.S. officials believe there is little or no sign of Assad being toppled imminently.

The situation, one senior European official said, is still likely to veer back and forth, like a tug-of-war between pro- and anti-Assad forces.

There is no indication, the official added, that Assad himself has any intention of doing anything but fighting on until the bitter end.

(additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in London and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; writing by Richard Woods; editing by Michael Stott and Ralph Boulton)

Well that did not work. The Syrian army did not collapse, the Syrian state was not decapitated and in Damascus and now in Aleppo those foreign fighters must realize that they cannot hold the positions that they have taken and if they try to stay there it is going to go very, very badly for them."

The British Foreign Secretary William Hague has said that the United Kingdom promises to increase its support for the armed gangs fighting the Syrian government.

Hague made the remarks at a joint press conference with the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in London.

The British government has already joined other Western countries in backing the groups of taking up arms against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, Turkey has set up a secret base near the Syrian border to send military and communications supplies to armed groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

According to a Qatari source, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are sending weapons and communications equipment for Syrian rebels via the base, which is located in the southern Turkish city of Adana, about one hundred kilometers from Syria’s border, Reuters reported on Friday.

According to the source, the base was set up after Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Saud visited Turkey and requested it.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian, to further discuss the issue. The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: First of all I like to get your opinion on how significant do you think is this directed mission being made by Hague that Britain is backing armed groups in Syria and that it is ready to step up its support for them?

Tarpley: Well he really had no choice. We had the Reuters news agency 24 to 36 hours ago publishing the report that you referred to about the Adana base supported actively by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and of course on Turkish territory.

This base was actually made to order during a visit by Saudi Prince Abdulaziz, the Deputy Foreign Minister who demanded that the Turks open up such a base. The trick with that base is Adana is right next to the Incirlik NATO air force base. It is Incirlik AFB and the account in Reuters is not certain whether the Adana logistical base for the death squads in Syria is actually on the NATO base. So at that point it is getting very hard to deny anything.

I think we have to look at the behavior not just of the British but also of Turkey which has been I think breathtaking irresponsible examples of real folly in the last couple of days. Erdogan, the leader of the country made a speech yesterday where he threatened the Syrians with hot pursuit. If PKK Kurdish elements from Northern Syria raid into Turkey then he is going to follow them back into Syria.

He needs to be reminded that the great principle of international relations is reciprocity and right now with that base that we have just heard about Turkey is actually sending terror teams into Syria and when they go back to Adana and then they would be subject also to hot pursuit which would include that NATO base.

The Turks have tried to cover themselves in the last days or two by saying that they are sealing their border but we have a very informative article here in the Washington Post a day or two ago where we find out that the Turks are only referring to the official border crossings and they have got a whole set of other semi-official border crossings which are actually run by the Turkish army where the Guerilla fighters and terrorists are being allowed to pass in both directions.

Press TV: Well that is an interesting point you made, the involvement of Turkey throughout what is happening in Syria. Now Turkey has set up a secret base, a nerve-center so to speak, which directly is sort of a route between mercenaries being sent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar into Syria? Now how do you think, what kind of a precedent is Turkey setting by undermining its own national security for the sake of NATO’s own ultimate objectives?

Tarpley: Well the old Greek proverb is “whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad” usually with hubris, excessive pride, overweening ambition and that seems to apply to Erdogan and unfortunately also Davutoglu. They have also got other problems though, they have got not only Syria and the Kurds but then there is also Russia.

I think the big development of the last week or so is this landmark statement by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that the United States policy is to justify terrorism. The US justifies terrorism and says Lavrov the US negotiating pasture from Susan Rice at the United Nations is essentially the United States will continue to support terrorism until the Security Council does what the US and NATO want and Lavrov deplored that position.

This is a very important moment I think in terms of clarifying what is going on. It seems to me now that it would be in order to follow up on that some kind of resolution in the Security Council or the General Assembly at the very least, condemning the United States for supporting terrorism in the person of al-Qaeda as you mentioned before.

This has now gone so far that a whole country is in crisis in Europe and it is Germany as your account mentioned the BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst has pointed to the overwhelming presence of al-Qaeda and you have got the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Welt and Bild-Zeitung, one of the biggest tabloids in Europe, all of them are taking I think important steps to show that the massacres in Syria are actually the handiwork of the anti-Assad forces, that is not the army and Assad who are doing these killings but it is the opposition and they do it with the desire to provoke a foreign intervention and in that regard we are told a lot about Aleppo.

Press TV: Well speaking of which Dr. Tarpley, let me just cut in there, the massacre that took place in Houla, there are reports now by German intelligence services that it was carried out by al-Qaeda. They have also admitted that numerous al-Qaeda attacks have taken place in Syria which have been blamed on Syrian security forces. Again the US is speaking of a massacre set to take place in Aleppo which is again reminiscent of what took place in Houla.

Now speaking of which, these countries are putting in as much as they can when it comes to Syria even their own integrity in the international arena. Do they even have a plan B if things don’t work out the way they have planned?Tarpley: Well their plan B is constricted in the sense that they fear possible retaliation from Putin and Russia and to some extent from China. They also fear the anti-aircraft systems, the SAMs, the surface to air missiles that are in the hands of Syria.

So their goal up to now has been to try to do this with Special Forces and sending in swarms of terrorist Guerilla fighters but that has not worked over the many months and in the past week to ten days the great escalation and the numbers that I have heard range from two to three thousand foreign fighters to tens of thousands of foreign fighters who were expected to swarm the main cities of Syria at the same time that the assassinations took place last Wednesday.

Well that did not work. The Syrian army did not collapse, the Syrian state was not decapitated and in Damascus and now in Aleppo those foreign fighters must realize that they cannot hold the positions that they have taken and if they try to stay there it is going to go very, very badly for them.

I would just point out Corriere Della Sera, big Milan newspaper, most important newspaper of record in Italy already on Thursday evening, last evening here in Washington said that the rebels have left Aleppo, they are fleeing towards the Turkish border and the only people left are the citizens of Aleppo.

Now then the New Yorker magazine correspondent who seems to speak for the US intelligence community says the opposite, the residents have fled and only people left are the fighters.

In either case you are absolutely right. Nobody should believe Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, these people discredited as they are lying as they have done the whole time. Any report of a massacre in Aleppo would have to be taken with a great deal of skepticism.
--

(Reuters) - Turkey has set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria's rebels from a city near the border, Gulf sources have told Reuters.

News of the clandestine Middle East-run "nerve centre" working to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad underlines the extent to which Western powers - who played a key role in unseating Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - have avoided military involvement so far in Syria.

"It's the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main co-ordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom," said a Doha-based source.

"The Americans are very hands-off on this. U.S. intel(ligence) are working through middlemen. Middlemen are controlling access to weapons and routes."

The centre in Adana, a city in southern Turkey about 100 km (60 miles) from the Syrian border, was set up after Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Saud visited Turkey and requested it, a source in the Gulf said. The Turks liked the idea of having the base in Adana so that they could supervise its operations, he added.

A Saudi foreign ministry official was not immediately available to comment on the operation.

Adana is home to Incirlik, a large Turkish/U.S. air force base which Washington has used in the past for reconnaissance and military logistics operations. It was not clear from the sources whether the anti-Syrian "nerve centre" was located inside Incirlik base or in the city of Adana.

Qatar, the tiny gas-rich Gulf state which played a leading part in supplying weapons to Libyan rebels, has a key role in directing operations at the Adana base, the sources said. Qatari military intelligence and state security officials are involved.

"All weaponry is Russian. The obvious reason is that these guys (the Syrian rebels) are trained to use Russian weapons, also because the Americans don't want their hands on it. All weapons are from the black market. The other way they get weapons is to steal them from the Syrian army. They raid weapons stores."

The source added: "The Turks have been desperate to improve their weak surveillance, and have been begging Washington for drones and surveillance." The pleas appear to have failed. "So they have hired some private guys come do the job."

President Barack Obama has so far preferred to use diplomatic means to try to oust Assad, although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled this week that Washington plans to step up help to the rebels.

Reuters has established that Obama's aides have drafted a resolution which would authorize greater covert assistance to the rebels but still stop short of arming them.

The White House's wariness is shared by other Western powers. It reflects concerns about what might follow Assad in Syria and about the substantial presence of anti-Western Islamists and jihadi fighters among the rebels.

The presence of the secret Middle East-run "nerve centre" may explain how the Syrian rebels, a rag-tag assortment of ill-armed and poorly organized groups, have pulled off major strikes such as the devastating bomb attack on July 18 which killed at least four key Assad aides including the defense minister.

A Turkish diplomat in the region insisted however that his country played no part in the Damascus bombing.

"That's out of the question," he said. "The Syrian minister of information blamed Turkey and other countries for the killing. Turkey doesn't do such things. We are not a terrorist country. Turkey condemns such attacks."

However, two former senior U.S. security officials said that Turkey has been playing an increasing role in sheltering and training Syrian rebels who have crossed into its territory.

One of the former officials, who is also an adviser to a government in the region, told Reuters that 20 former Syrian generals are now based in Turkey, from where they are helping shape the rebel forces. Israel believes up to 20,000 Syrian troops may now have defected to the opposition.

Former officials said there is reason to believe the Turks stepped up their support for anti-Assad forces after Syria shot down a Turkish plane which had made several passes over border areas.

Sources in Qatar said the Gulf state is providing training and supplies to the Syrian rebels.

"The Qataris mobilized their special forces team two weeks ago. Their remit is to train and help logistically, not to fight," said a Doha-based source with ties to the FSA.

Qatar's military intelligence directorate, Foreign Ministry and State Security Bureau are involved, said the source.

WESTERN CAUTION

The United States, Israel, France and Britain - traditionally key players in the Middle East - have avoided getting involved so far, largely because they see little chance of a "good outcome" in Syria.

"Israel is not really in the business of trying to 'shape' the outcome of the revolt,", a diplomat in the region said. "The consensus is that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. The risk of identifying with any side is too great".

A former U.S. official who advises a government in the region and other current and former U.S. and European security officials say that there has been little to zero direct assistance or training from the U.S. or its European allies.

The former official also said that few sophisticated weapons such as shoulder-fired bazookas for destroying tanks or surface-to-air missiles have reached the anti-Assad forces.

While some Gulf officials and conservative American politicians have privately suggested that a supply of surface-to-air missiles would help anti-Assad forces bring the conflict to a close, officials familiar with U.S. policy say they are anxious to keep such weapons out of the hands of Syrian rebels. They fear such weapons could make their way to pro-jihad militants who could use them against Western aircraft.

AFTER ASSAD

The CIA and the Israelis' main concern so far has been that elements of al-Qaeda may attempt to infiltrate the rebels and acquire some of Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons.

Sima Shine, a former chief Mossad analyst who now serves as an adviser to the Israeli government, told Reuters: "It's a nightmare for the international community, and chiefly the Americans - weapons of mass-destruction falling into the hands of terrorists. In parallel to its foreign contacts, Israel is taking this especially seriously. After all, we are here, and the Americans are over there."

She envisaged two circumstances under which Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist group, could obtain some of the chemical weapons stockpile.

"Assad goes and anarchy ensues, during which Hezbollah gets its hands on the weapons. There is a significant Hezbollah presence in Syria and they are well-ensconced in the military and other national agencies. So they are close enough to make a grab for it.

"Another possibility is that Assad, knowing that he is on his way out, will authorized a handover to Hezbollah, as a message to the world about the price of encouraging his ouster."

However, British and U.S. officials believe there is little or no sign of Assad being toppled imminently.

The situation, one senior European official said, is still likely to veer back and forth, like a tug-of-war between pro- and anti-Assad forces.

There is no indication, the official added, that Assad himself has any intention of doing anything but fighting on until the bitter end.

(additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in London and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; writing by Richard Woods; editing by Michael Stott and Ralph Boulton)

Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.

Frans de Waal studies primate social behavior -- how they fight and reconcile, share and cooperate.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.” (Frans de Waal)

Controverting majority opinion, F. William Engdahl questions the spontaneity of the protest movements in Arab countries and sees them as a replay of the US-orchestrated colour revolutions that triggered regime change in post-Soviet countries. The same script and cast of characters are at hand: local opposition leaders coached by CIA-front organizations in the art of staging "spontaneous" uprisings. However, Washington’s current stratagem may well backfire. Unlike East Europeans, the "American way of life" is hardly what the Arab masses are putting their life on the line for.

Game over?

Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisiacame a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as "creative destruction".

The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the De Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US-backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear. Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.

No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians [1]. He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder-sounding "New Middle East."

As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days [2].

The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.

Egypt rising?

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancient regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long-term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.

Washington ’soft’ revolutions

The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as "spontaneous" as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make

them to be.

They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported [3].

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.

April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.

According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, "Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process" [4].

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood. Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood [5].

ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists [6]. Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Kefaya—Pentagon ’non-violent warfare’

Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to "enough!"

Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [7] and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means "enough!"

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as "non-violence as a method of warfare" [8].

The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills. The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood [9] . Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections [10].

RAND and Kefaya

No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was "sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community" [11].

A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.

In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:

"The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, ’As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export’ (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals. However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country" [12].

RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name "swarming," the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees [13].

Washington and the stable of "human rights" and "democracy" and "non-violence" NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated "spontaneous" nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:

"The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and non-profit institutions" [14].

The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other "reform" movements:

"The US government should encourage non-governmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even non-governmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers" [15].

As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the "RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics".

The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes "research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements" [16].

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks with "Egyptian activists promoting freedom and democracy", prior to meetings at the State Department in Washington, DC, May 28, 2009.

In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another "human rights" Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in US-sponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month "fellowship" organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program [17]

Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring "democracy" and "liberal free market" economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.

Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since theTunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.

Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to "spontaneous" popular regime-change uprisings.

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order [18].

As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" [19].

The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998 [20].

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.

NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.

The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,

"NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States" [21].

Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED [22].

In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated "Islamic radicalism" with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term "broader Middle East" for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,

"The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end...We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow... " [23].

The US Project for a ’Greater Middle East’

The spreading regime change operations from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.

The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.

That policy recommendation was titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon [24]. Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky.

By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch-warhawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.

Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

In May 2009, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of "spreading democracy" to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant "the establishment of a US-Middle East free trade area within a decade" [25].

Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, "G8-Greater Middle East Partnership". Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for "an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe".

The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, "a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each" [26].

The G8 Map of Washington’s Greater Middle East extends right to the borders of China and Russia and West to Morocco.

The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de factocontrolled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the ArabicAl-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, "besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife" [27]. It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

Will it work?

At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a US-dominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, "The Israeli calculation today is that if ’Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ’If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region" [28].

The Washington strategy of "creative destruction" is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

[18] George Herbert Walker Bush, "State of the Union Address to Congress", 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, "What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order...".

[19] Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, "Openness is the Secret to Democracy", Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.